


Connections

by Crowsister



Series: Blüdhaven Blues [3]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tabletop Gaming, Angsty WLW, F/F, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 12:40:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14189163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowsister/pseuds/Crowsister
Summary: These are mundane snapshots that are supposed to parallel different members of Rai's pantheon. The more I looked into and read about Mr. Miracle (Scott Free), the more similar I realized that he and Raimonda are. The others of her pantheon (Highfather, Atinai, Darkseid [listed in her pantehon as Zonuz-son to keep with the acronym], Astorr, and Metron) are gonna be much harder, but it's a challenge I'm gonna like undertaking.For now, have some angst.





	Connections

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SuperKamiGodEspurrOfMan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperKamiGodEspurrOfMan/gifts).



> These are mundane snapshots that are supposed to parallel different members of Rai's pantheon. The more I looked into and read about Mr. Miracle (Scott Free), the more similar I realized that he and Raimonda are. The others of her pantheon (Highfather, Atinai, Darkseid [listed in her pantehon as Zonuz-son to keep with the acronym], Astorr, and Metron) are gonna be much harder, but it's a challenge I'm gonna like undertaking.
> 
> For now, have some angst.

####  **Blüdhaven, NJ** **  
** **January 4th, 1984**

She sighed, rolling her shoulders back. The woman looked down at the locked diary in front of her, the red leather faded to a light pink. She smiled, moving her brown hair out of her face with a finger, and chuckled under her breath.

“If little Raimonda knew you were now  _ pink _ , Ms. Diary,” she muttered as she tapped her finger along the cover, “she’d feel so betrayed...God, I hated pink so much as a kid.”

Raimonda looked around her new—and still clean as a Spartan’s barracks, despite the boxes littering everywhere—apartment, having paused in the middle of unpacking once she had found the diary from middle school. She was hit with a weird nostalgia upon seeing it and needed a break from the hoard of boxes. So, here she was: the diary on the mahogany coffee table beside her, her in a dining-room-table-chair, and the bouncy opening to “Holding Out for a Hero” quietly playing from a CD player.

She opened the diary, reading.

_August 1977  
Dear Ms. Diary,_

_ God, can we discuss a name change? I’m 13, can we forget that I wrote my first entry at 2 AM with zero naming skills and give you a better name? _

Raimonda snorted, rolling her eyes. “It only gets worse, doesn’t it, Philip?” She called, looking over at the refrigerator in the other room.

_ Anyway, we finally moved. Dad got me transferred to the fancy school, up in the Square since...we live there now. That’s so weird to think about. I’m used to the bad neighborhood and walking home looking over my shoulder, but...the Square’s supposed to be better than that. I’m not sure I buy it, but what do I know, it’s not like I’ve spent any amount of time there. _

“It only gets worse,” Raimonda muttered, tapping the chicken scratch writing of her younger self. “It only gets worse. Wait until Dad gets a  _ lesson  _ from the local gang, little me. You’ll see red.” She flipped a few pages, looking for a specific section that she remembered. She paused, seeing old tear stains on one entry from September 1977. Raimonda looked closer at it, tilting her head.

_ I hate it here, at this school. The math teacher I have, Mrs. Pearson, hates me. Sure, I can’t add up two three-digit numbers in my head, but that doesn’t make me as stupid as she treats me! She made a big speech, in front of the whole class, about how my “habits” are going to lead to me being a big failure in life. I just doodle! It’s just doodling! Not even a penis doodle like Theodore does, just like...snakes. Not even close to a penis! You know, Ms. Diary, that I really want a pet snake, but it’s not like we’ll ever be able to afford one. So I cope, by doodling my dream snake. My teachers at my old school found it okay, even encouraged me. But Mrs. Pearson doesn’t find it okay. She says it’s distracting me from my work and that it’s disruptive. It’s MY worksheet! I do it quietly and I don’t call attention to it. _

_ Ugh. Sometimes, I wish I  was a snake. Then I’d be able to slither out of this hellhole of a school. And bite Mrs. Pearson. Or strangle her. Guess that depends on what kind of snake I am. Ms. Diary, what is the best kind of snake at getting away from bigger predators? I’m thinking Mrs. Pearson is a cranky old bear, honestly. _

Raimonda closed the diary, rubbing her eye with a hand while staring at a point on the wall. Bonnie Tyler sang in the background and Raimonda just muttered, “It only gets worse.” She got up, unpacking more and more of her things.

She paused once again at an old scrapbook. She flipped it open, finding more and more sad memories within. A picture of her at her father’s church, his star...yet she wasn’t allowed to be the soloist of the choir because it’d implicate her father in a plot of practicing favoritism (Catholic priests couldn’t  _ possibly  _ do that). There was another picture that made her pause more, the glimmer-y photo emphasizing the wide grin across her past-self’s soaking wet face.

It was her when she was six, still firmly in her pigtail phase. When it was  _ cute _ for her to dance and sing in the rain, in the thunder, with lightning in the distance. Raimonda sighed, running a finger into the thick tail of her ponytail and twisting some of the hair around her finger. Thunder had always made it feel like God was listening, when she was little. That thunder was just God talking really loudly from really far away. But when she hit eleven, coincidentally the same year that she had to get her first bra and the very same year the men at her father’s church started looking at her differently, that behavior wasn’t appropriate anymore. Her father had said it was pagan behavior, not answering her protests when she said that he hadn’t minded when she was younger.

It wasn’t until Gertrude that she knew what any of that meant.

“Oh God, Phillip, do you think that they left her photo in here?” Raimonda asked, looking through the scrapbook. “I mean, I’ve got yearbooks for that stuff if Gert’s not in here, but...there’s that one picture we took with that stolen camera...” 

She flipped through pages, fingers skimming across them. She stopped. Her finger brushed along a pale face. Gertrude’s face was broad, sturdy, sturdier than it should’ve been at 13. She had a smile on her busted lips, but the stinging pain that Raimonda remembered having with her own busted lip in this picture didn’t seem to be bothering Gert at all. She had to lean down to be able to be in the same picture frame as tiny 13 year old Raimonda. She snorted in amusement, remembering how Gert would tease her for her 4’5” height and how Rai swore she’d grow to be taller than Gert. At 22 and being 4’8” for a couple years now, she wished she could tell her younger self that her dreams of being six foot were never happening.

Her hand drifted back to the diary, plucking it back up and hunting down the first mention of Gertrude.

_ Anyways, ENOUGH about Mrs. Pearson (and her unending tyranny), Ms. Diary, let’s talk about the new girl. _

_ Gertrude Fisher. Honestly? I thought people like her only existed in books, but she’s real. Really, really  real . I think she’s six feet tall, I dunno, my height judgement has always been off, but she TOWERS over everyone, even adults! Mrs. Pearson’s like five feet tall, but Gertrude’s a head and a half taller than her. She’s got long black hair and, Ms. Diary, it’s gotta be a  lot of hair. She wears it in these really neat braids and the braids are l ong , so it’s gotta be a lot of hair. She’s buff too – buffer than a lot of girls around here. I wonder if she goes to a boxing studio like I do, because the biceps seem to give that sort of impression. But that wouldn’t explain the legs. The legs are something else. _

Raimonda snorted loudly, reading that line. “Holy shit, that early? I thought I was a little slower than that.” She tilted her head, leaning back in her chair and looked up at the bland white ceiling. “Okay. No. I  _ was _ slow with realizing what was going on. But I’ll admit that I kinda fell face first.” She snorted again, leaning back forward and rolling her shoulders back. She skipped several pages, finding Gert’s name again.

_ Gert’s upped my standards for what qualifies as an interesting conversation. She’s taught me so much, most of it being like. Different ways to view things. She’s the first atheist I’ve ever gotten to  know and she’s not a bad person. She never screams at me to drop my faith like other atheists have. We just agree to disagree a lot on religious stuff, but still ask for each other’s perspectives on stuff. _

_ I was telling her what happened with Dad, y’know, when he yelled at me for looking out the window at a thunderstorm last week. He’s still been on me about that by the way, Ms. Diary. You’d think he’d drop it and just let me like non-sunny weather, but nooooo. _

_ She answered that story with one about how her mom gets upset with her for her kickboxing, saying how her mom gets upset with her because it’s unladylike. Gert said it didn’t bother her and that kind of stuck with me. I asked her, Ms. Diary, why she doesn’t get bothered by it and she told me something interesting. This is what I remember of the conversation – I couldn’t get it out of my head, so maybe if I write it in here it’ll stop haunting me. _

_ Gert: “Your dad says he tries to keep you away from thunderstorms because he loves you, right? So, you’re bothered by it because you’ve put it down as an act of him caring about you. Because you believe him.” _

_ Me: “I mean. I’ve been taught all my life that I’m a kid of God. But with my interpretations of God differing from Dad’s...what do I know about believing?” _

_ Gert: “You do know about believing. More than I probably ever will. You did and do and  will keep believing that all of his behavior is love. Because God, who’ve you been taught is a father to you, has shown you to  expect love via what’s written in the Bible, right?” _

_ Me: “Right.” _

_ Gert: “Me? I never had that and probably will never have that. I don’t have it in me to be like you and believe in God because where was God when I had bad experiences that left me scarred? Where was God when everything bad that’s ever happened to me or you or anyone when He supposedly loves us all? So, I don’t and  can’t expect anything from God or anyone else. All I can do is to take the bad memories and all the hurt and turn it to TV snow, make it all noise. When people calling me slurs, insults, and trying to hurt me, to control me? It’s all just noise. And I don’t believe noise.” _

_ I wish I could have told her God is there in her strength, but to be honest, Ms. Diary, that would be rude. Her strength is hers and hers alone. Sure, God may have helped her reach the conclusion she has to inspire her to be so, so, so strong by setting up her life like that, because the world needs strong people like her, but that sort of story robs her of her agency. Where I need to believe that God’s in the thunder and in the love in my life from the people around me, she doesn’t need anyone. _

_ I just kind of wish she needed someone like me. _

Raimonda blinked, realizing there were tears in her eyes. She put down the diary, rubbing the tears out of her eyes with her knuckles, and took a shuddering breath. “Sorry, little Rai. Nobody’s ever going to need you. Your dad’s going to get her chased out of town because he didn’t realize or didn’t care that she was your only friend. The last time you see her, she’ll shout at you for just standing there and doing nothing. She’ll give you hope that things can be better, but...it only gets worse. You’ll be stuck in a life you hate, struggling to pick up the pieces.” She leaned back in her chair, taking another breath and trying to calm herself down. “It only gets worse for you...but I’m trying to turn that around, okay?”

Getting out of her chair, she walked into the kitchen and gently patted the refrigerator. “Philip would still be in that junkyard if not for us, little Rai. We decided that we could get him fixed up and we did. He was tossed away, forgotten, and thought to be broken. Just like how you’ll feel. Just like how I feel some days. But...there’s hope outside Gert needing us. Philip needs us and the station – the folks at the station are  _ excited _ to have us as their new secretary. Gert’ll hurt...she still does, to be honest with you, little me. But...others need us. You. Me. If I can be even a small candle light in someone’s dark time, make their day by complimenting their hair or remembering how they take their coffee...then us...you...me existing is worth it.” 

She took a deep breath, opening the refrigerator and taking out a water bottle. She chugged it, the cold helping her focus on her own logic by cutting through the mugginess of the early dehydration that’d been setting in her throat. Raimonda put down the bottle, wiping the spare drops of water on the back of her head and panting lightly. “If I can make people happy...give them a little light in their days,” Raimonda repeated, rolling her shoulders back, “then it’ll only get better for me. Their smiles will make my life only better for me.”

**Author's Note:**

> It gets better for Rai, I swear. With this snapshot, I wanted to establish why her having Scott around is good for her: if there's anything that Scott has been shown to give to Rai in sessions, it's hope that there's always a way out. Whether that's running from responsibility or escaping from certain doom, he's always been in her corner for giving her the hope that there's always a way out and thus, a way to move forward despite whatever's coming at her.
> 
> Lili's probably laughing at this note, considering Scott has ranged from encouraged Rai to quit her day job for petty theft to being an ice cream gremlin, but that's a lot of it. Scott reminds Rai, ironically, to be a normal person and to not get caught up in all of cosmic drama all the time. And that's why he's her favorite.
> 
> I'd like to note that there was a LOT of inspiration for this piece from the recent Mr. Miracle run. Some of Gert's lines are taken/inspired by lines Big Barda says during that run.


End file.
